Major religions all contain macabre fables, explicit injunctions for vile behavior no civilzed person should accept

Bill Maher’s recent monologue on “Real Time”
about the failure of liberals to speak out about the routine atrocities
and violations of human rights carried out in the name of religion in
the Muslim world has unleashed a torrent of commentary, much of it from
progressives advocating more, not less, tolerance of Islam.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who sided with Ben Affleck against Maher in a follow-up segment a few days later, calls ISIS rebels, in an op-ed, “barbarians”
who “give all Islam a bad name,” and asks us to take into account the
religion’s diversity, lest we slip into “Islamophobic bigotry.” Fareed
Zakaria, in his Washington Post column, cautions us to recall
that Islam, Christianity and Judaism once peacefully coexisted, but
acknowledges that Islam suffers from a “cancer” – extremism that incites
acts of terrorism. This he views, though, as a problem of “Islam
today.” (He neglects to point out that in the Muslim-dominated countries
where this peaceful coexistence occurred, Christians and Jews suffered
humiliating second-rate dhimmi status, unequal legally or socially to
Muslims.) Writing on Al Jazeera English, Lana Asfour lauds Affleck
for calling out Maher’s “racism” and espies, in the comedian’s
treatment of Islam, an “overriding agenda” aimed at justifying the
“past, present, and future mistakes” of U.S. foreign policy.

One
pundit in particular, though, has busied himself opining on Maher and
nonbelievers in general — Reza Aslan, Islam’s most prominent apologist
of late. Delivered via multiple media outlets, his remarks, brimming
with condescension, tinged with arrogance and laden with implicit
insults to thinking people, deserve special scrutiny for one main
reason: among well-intentioned liberals who don’t know much about
religion, his words carry weight.

In a New York Times editorial,
Aslan accused Maher and other nonbelievers of “exhibiti[ing] an
inability to understand religion outside of its absolutist
connotations.” Such folk, in his telling, unjustly “scour holy texts for
bits of savagery and point to extreme examples of religious bigotry, of
which there are too many, to generalize about the causes of oppression
throughout the world.” They fail to grasp, in his view, that “religion
is often far more a matter of identity than it is a matter of beliefs
and practices.”

Yet Aslan accuses the benighted critics of
religion of a far more grievous misapprehension: the assumption that
words mean what they actually mean. Here I’ll quote him at length.

“It
is a fallacy to believe that people of faith derive their values
primarily from their Scriptures. The opposite is true. People of faith
insert their values into their scriptures, reading them through the lens
of their own cultural, ethnic, nationalistic and even political
perspectives. . . . After all, scripture is meaningless without
interpretation. The abiding nature of scripture rests not so much in
its truth claims as it does in its malleability, its ability to be
molded and shaped into whatever form a worshiper requires. . . If you
are a violent misogynist, you will find plenty in your scriptures to
justify your beliefs. If you are a peaceful, democratic feminist, you
will also find justification in the scriptures for your point of view.”

Now
we have to stop and ponder what we are being sold here. Aslan is
essentially taking a postmodernist, Derrida-esque scalpel to “scripture”
and eviscerating it of objective content. This might pass muster in the
college classroom these days, but what of all those ISIS warriors
unschooled in French semiotic analysis who take their holy book’s
admonition to do violence literally? As they rampage and behead their
way through Syria and Iraq, ISIS fighters know they have the Koran on
their side – a book they believe to be inerrant and immutable, the final
Word of God, and not at all “malleable.” Their holy book backs up
jihad, suicide attacks (“martyrdom”), beheadings, even taking captive women as sex slaves.
This is not surprising; after all, the prophet Muhammad was a warrior
who spread Islam by the sword in a dark, turbulent time in history.
(Christianity’s propagation had, in contrast, much to do with the Roman
emperor Constantine’s fourth-century conversion and subsequent
decriminalization of the faith.)

We are losing badly to the corporate state. Here's what we need to do.

As
the editor of AlterNet for 20 years, I have read and seen the entire
range of horrendous and growing problems we face as a society and a
planet virtually every day. It is not just climate change, or ISIL, or
Ferguson, or poverty and homelessness, or more misogynistic murdering of
women, or the Democrats about to lose the Senate as Obama gets more
unpopular. It is much, much more. Every day, it passes by before my
eyes. At AlterNet, there are no issue silos—there is just the open
faucet of depressing political information coming and going every hour
of every day (with the occasional story of success and inspiration).

So
I am sorry to share my deep-seated opinion, which should jibe with
anyone who is paying attention. After decades of engagement in
progressive politics and media, it is very clear to me: we progressives,
liberals, common-sense people, are losing badly to the conservative
business state, the tyranny of massively expanding tech companies,
theocratic right-wing forces and pervasive militarism, home and abroad.
By virtually every measure, things are getting worse. And things are
trending much, much worse in ways we can easily measure, like
inequality, climate, militarization of police forces, etc., and in ways
that are more psychological and emotional.

Americans are very pessimistic: 76 percent of respondents in a Wall Street Journalpoll
did not feel confident that their children’s generation will have a
better life than theirs. That’s up from 60 percent in 2007. Optimism for
Americans peaked in 2001. The percentage of American adults who believe
the country is on the wrong track jumped eight percentage points just
this summer, to 71 percent, the WSJ poll found.

And
Americans' dark views of the future are rational, as their lives have
become so much more difficult and depressing. People are working longer
hours, working far past previous retirement age—if they can retire at
all. Many Americans do not take vacations. And many Americans of all
ages can't find good jobs, or can only find low-paying and often
part-time work, which causes their lifestyles to plummet. College
graduates are burdened with heavy debt.

Younger generations know
that the perhaps romantic notion of the American Dream, for most people,
lies in the trash bin. Over the past 15 years there was more than a 50
percent increase in people thinking there is a lack of opportunity in America (it is now just about half of all Americans). And 59 percent of Americans believe the American Dream is impossible to achieve for most people.

In terms of inequality, the Huffington Postwrote: "more than 45 million people, or 14.5 percent of all Americans, lived below the poverty line last year, the Census Bureau reported.…The
annual income threshold for being counted as living in poverty was
$11,490 last year for a person and $23,550 for a family of four."

Poverty
is particularly dire for single mothers: A third of all families headed
by single women were in poverty last year—that's 15.6 million such
households. The black poverty rate was 27.2 percent.… More than 11
million black Americans lived below the poverty level last year. About
42.5 percent of the households headed by single black women were in
poverty. The Hispanic poverty rate was 23.5 percent.”

Liberals yearn to believe in post-ideological blank slates -- and get disappointed every time. Will we ever learn?

That
we are living through an endless repeat of the 1970s is becoming more
apparent all the time. Nostalgia and retro culture burn as brightly
today as they did in the era of “Happy Days” and “American Graffiti,”
while distrust and suspicion of government hover at near-Watergate
levels. Disaster dreams are everywhere, just as they were in the days of
“The Towering Inferno” and Three Mile Island. The culture wars, the
1970s’ No. 1 gift to American politics, still drag on and on, while the
New Right, the decade’s other great political invention, effortlessly
rejuvenates itself. Jerry Brown is governor of California again. The
Kansas City Royals are a good team.

No reminiscence of that decade
of malaise would be complete without mentioning Jimmy Carter, the
president who—fairly or not—will be forever associated with national
drift and decline and all the other horrors that were eventually swept
away by the Reagan magisterium. Indeed, comparing the hapless Carter to
whoever currently leads the Democratic Party remains a powerful
shibboleth for American conservatives, and in 2011 and 2012 Republicans
indulged in this favorite simile without hesitation.

I pretty much ignored the Carter-Obama comparison in those days because it was so manifestly empty—a partisan insult based on nothing
but the lousy economy faced by both Carter and Obama as well as the
recurring problem of beleaguered American embassies in the Muslim world.
(Get it? Benghazi=Tehran!) More important for Republican purposes was
the memory that Jimmy Carter lost his re-election campaign, which they
creatively merged with their hopes that Obama would lose, too. Other
than that, the comparison had little connection to actual facts; it was a waste of trees and precious pixels.

What
has changed my mind about the usefulness of the comparison is my friend
Rick Perlstein’s vast and engrossing new history of the ’70s, “The
Invisible Bridge.” The book’s main subject is the rise of Ronald Reagan,
but Perlstein’s detailed description of Carter’s run for the presidency
in 1976 evokes more recent events so startlingly that the comparison
with Obama is impossible to avoid. After talking over the subject with
Perlstein (watch this space for the full interview), I am more startled
by the similarities than ever.

In 1976, when Carter shocked the
political world by beating a field of better-known politicians for the
Democratic presidential nomination, the essence of his appeal was pure
idealism—idealism without ideology, even. He presented himself,
Perlstein writes, as an “antipolitician,” a figure of reconciliation who
could restore our best qualities after the disasters of Vietnam and
Watergate.

Jimmy Carter’s actual politics were ambiguous, however, in a way that should be very familiar. His speechwriter James Fallows wrote in 1979
that he initially signed up with the candidate out of a hope that he
“might look past the tired formulas of left and right and offer
something new.” As with Barack Obama, who promised to bring a
post-partisan end to Washington squabbling, Jimmy Carter’s idealism was
not a matter of policies or political ideas but rather of the candidate
as a person, a transcendent figure of humility and uprightness.

If you don't have a place to live, getting enough to eat clearly may be a struggle. And since homelessness in the U.S. isn't going away
and is even rising in some cities, more charitable groups and
individuals have been stepping up the past few years to share food with
these vulnerable folks in their communities.

But just as more people reach out to help, cities are biting back at those hands feeding the homeless.According to a report
released Monday by the National Coalition for the Homeless, 21 cities
have passed measures aimed at restricting the people who feed the
homeless since January 2013. In that same time, similar legislation was
introduced in more than 10 cities. Combined, these measures represent a
47 percent increase in the number of cities that have passed or
introduced legislation to restrict food sharing since the coalition last
counted in 2010.

The latest city to crack down is Fort Lauderdale, Fla. According to the Sun Sentinel, the city's commissioners passed a measure
early Wednesday that will require feeding sites to be more than 500
feet away from each other, with only one allowed per city block. They'll
also have to be at least 500 feet from residential properties.

Michael Stoops,
director of community organizing for the coalition and the editor of
the report, says that as cities have felt more pressure to prioritize
economic development and tourism, they've decided that food sharing
programs — especially those that happen in public spaces and draw
dozens, if not hundreds of people — are problematic.

"We consider measures like the one in Fort Lauderdale to be criminalizing being homeless or helping the homeless," says Stoops.

Cities
like Fort Lauderdale aren't throwing people in jail for feeding the
homeless or being homeless. But often, they're creating more ways to
impose fines.

And yet, Stoops argues that the measures will ultimately be ineffective in addressing the real problem: homelessness itself.

"Cities'
hope is that restricting sharing of food will somehow make [the]
homeless disappear and go away," Stoops tells The Salt. "But I can
promise you that even if these ordinances are adopted, it's not going to
get rid of homelessness."

BAGHDAD
— From the battlefield near Baiji, an Islamic State jihadist fired a
heat-seeking missile and blew an Iraqi Army Mi-35M attack helicopter out
of the sky this month, killing its two crew members.

Days later, the Islamic State released a chilling series of images from a video purporting to capture the attack in northern Iraq:
a jihadist hiding behind a wall with a Chinese-made missile launcher
balanced on his shoulder; the missile blasting from the tube, its
contrail swooping upward as it tracked its target; the fiery impact and
the wreckage on a rural road.

The
helicopter was one of several Iraqi military helicopters that the
militants claim to have shot down this year, and the strongest evidence
yet that Islamic State fighters in Iraq are using advanced
surface-to-air missile systems that pose a serious threat to aircraft
flown by Iraq and the American-led coalition.

As
the counteroffensive against the Islamic State enters a more aggressive
phase in Iraq, allied airstrikes will also intensify. American
officials say they fully expect that the push will bring out more proof
of the jihadists’ antiaircraft abilities, with potentially serious
consequences for how the Iraqis and their coalition partners wage their
war.

“Based
on past conflicts,” said one senior American military official who
spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss delicate intelligence
assessments, the missiles “are game changers out there.”

The
proliferation of antiaircraft weaponry has also heightened concerns
about the vulnerability of Iraq’s airports, particularly Baghdad
International Airport, the country’s most important transportation hub
and a lifeline for military supplies and reinforcements to Iraq.

Signaling its intent to challenge American supremacy in the skies, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS
or ISIL, recently published an online guide describing how to use
shoulder-fired missiles to shoot down an Apache attack helicopter, one
of the most fearsome weapons in the United States Army’s conventional
arsenal.

Klein’s This Changes Everything is
a ground-breaking work on how climate change changes everything.
Written with an elegant blend of science, statistics, field reports and
personal insight, it does not paralyze but buoys the reader. The book's
exploration of climate change from the perspective of how capitalism
functions produces fresh insights and its examination of the
interconnectedness between our relationship with nature and the creation
of better, fairer societies presents a radical proposal. Klein’s
urgency and outrage is balanced by meticulous documentation and
passionate argument. Heart and mind go hand in hand in this magisterial
response to a present crisis.

Klein admitted being
quite surprised by the award—saying from the podium that "this wasn't
suppose to happen." Directly after receiving the award, the author explained the nature of her surprise to Brian Bethune at MacLean's by saying, “The
book is a really radical thesis and this is an establishment prize.”
Hilary Weston is a former liutenant governor of Ontario and is married
to Galen Weston, who runs a food and retail empire in the country. The
family is recognized as the second-wealthiest in Canada.

”I
suppose I have [Prime Minister] Stephen Harper to thank for the book’s
success," Klein told Bethune. "Every day, he tells Canadians they have
to choose between economic prosperity and environmental and climatic
protection, and Canadians know that’s not true. They know they don’t
have to make that choice. But we do have to talk about change; we need
this conversation.”In a post-award interview with CBC Books,
Klein said that perhaps the award would allow "even people who disagree
with my politics" to engage with the book. "For me, I want the book to
stimulate debate, I don't just want the book to entrench people's
positions," she said.

In a subsequent televised interview with the CBC's
Andrew Nichols on Wednesday, Klein said that while it was very nice to
be recognized for her writing and the quality of the work—the prize is
decided by a jury of writers—she thinks the real strength of the book,
and readers' attraction to it, ultimately hinges on its subject matter.

What
the book is really calling for, explained Klein, is having a more
"strategic economy" in which the sectors that are fueling climate
change—with special focus on the fossil fuel industry—are wound down and
the sectors that have lesser negative impacts on the planet's natural
systems are revved up. "We know what we need to do in the face of this
crisis," she said. "It's just that we have an economic system that seems
to be locking us into this one particular road. So we need to talk
about that system, not just the carbon."

And when Nichols asked if she was essentially advocating for a new economic system, Klein quickly answered, "I am."

A major study recently published
in New Scientist found that "scientists may have hugely underestimated
the extent of global warming because temperature readings from southern
hemisphere seas were inaccurate," and said that ACD is "worse than we
thought" because it is happening "faster than we realized."

As has
become predictable now, as evidence of increasing ACD continues to
mount, denial and corporate exploitation are accelerating right along
with it.

The famed Northwest Passage is now being exploited by
luxury cruise companies. Given the ongoing melting of the Arctic ice
cap, a company recently announced
a 900-mile, 32-day luxury cruise there, with fares starting at $20,000,
so people can luxuriate while viewing the demise of the planetary
ecosystem.

This, while even mainstream scientists now no longer view ACD in the future tense, but as a reality that is already well underway and severely impacting the planet.

To provide perspective on how far along we are regarding runaway ACD, another recent study
shows that the planet's wildlife population is less than half the size
it was four decades ago. The culprits are both ACD and unsustainable
human consumption, coupling to destroy habitats faster than previously
thought, as biodiversity loss has now reached "critical levels,"
according to the report. More than half of the vertebrate population on
the planet has been annihilated in just four decades.

They're eyeing the other half.

According
to a new report, the richest one percent have got their mitts on almost
half the world's assets. Think that’s the end of the story? Think
again. This is only the beginning.

The “ Global Annual Wealth Report,”
freshly released by investment giant Credit Suisse, analyzes the
shocking trend of growing wealth inequality around the world. What the
researchers find is that global wealth has increased every year since
2008, and that personal wealth seems to be rising at the fastest rate
ever recorded, much of it driven by strong equity markets. But the
benefits of this growth have largely been channeled to those who are
already affluent. While the restaurant workers in America struggled to
achieve wages of $10 an hour for their labor, those invested in equities
saw their wealth soar without lifting a finger. So it goes around the
world.

The bottom half of the world’s people now own less than 1
percent of total wealth, and they’re struggling to hold onto even that
minuscule portion. On the other hand, the wealthiest 10 percent have
accumulated a staggering 87 percent of global assets. The top percentile
has 48.2 percent of the world wealth. For now.

One of the scary
things about the wealth of the supperich is what French economist Thomas
Piketty pointed out in his best-selling book, Capital in the 21st Century.
Once they’ve got a big chunk of wealth, their share will get bigger
even if they sit by and do absolutely nothing. Piketty sums up this
economic reality in a simple and horrifying formula: r > g.

Basically,
this means that when rate of return on wealth is greater than the
overall rate of growth of the economy, as it has nearly always been
throughout history, the rich will grow inevitably richer and the poor
poorer unless there is some kind of intervention, like higher taxes on
wealth, for example. If r is less than g, the assets of the
super-wealthy will erode, but if r is greater than g, you eventually get
the explosion of gigantic inherited fortunes and dynasties.

This is happening now: If you look at the Forbes 400
list of the wealthiest people in America, you see a lot more inherited
fortunes in the upper ranks than you did a couple of decades ago, when
the policies that held inequality at bay began to get dismantled. In
today’s top 10, there are more scions of the Walton family than
entrepreneurs like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. These people have
essentially done nothing of value for society, and yet their undue
influence shapes our political landscape with the wave of a wad of
cash.

New York Times
columnist Ross Douthat apologized for appearing at a fundraising event
for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an extreme anti-gay legal group
working to criminalize homosexuality.On October 16, Douthat spoke at "The Price of Citizenship: Losing Religious Freedom in America,"
an event held by ADF and aimed at drawing attention to a number of
popular right-wing horror stories about the threat LGBT equality poses
to religious liberty. Douthat spoke alongside radio host Hugh Hewitt and
the Benham brothers, who are notorious for their history of extreme anti-gay, anti-choice, and anti-Muslim rhetoric. The event ended with explicit solicitations for donations to support ADF's legal work.

As Media Mattersnoted, ADF is one of the most extreme anti-gay legal groups
in the country, fighting against even basic legal protections for LGBT
people and working internationally to repress LGBT human rights,
including supporting Belize's draconian law criminalizing gay sex.

On
Wednesday, Douthat explained that he did not know ADF's event was a
fundraiser and said he plans to decline the honorarium he received from
the event.

"I was not aware in advance that this event was a
fundraiser and had I known, I would not have agreed to participate," he
said in a statement issued to Media Matters through the Times Wednesday.
"I was invited by an events organizing group, not by ADF directly. I
understood this to be a public conversation about religious liberty.
This is my fault for not doing my due diligence, and I will be declining
the honorarium."

Douthat has previously lamented
the opposition to Arizona's SB 1062, a law that would have allowed
business owners to refuse service to gay customers and that was largely orchestrated by ADF."Douthat's
helping ADF raise money is disturbing," said Richard Rosendall,
president of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, D.C.
"I am not inclined to jump all over the Times for it, as they
feature a range of columnists and a columnist needs some room to say and
do the wrong thing, and then be duly criticized for it. But ADF does
not merely engage in polite disagreement. It is relentless in its
attacks on equal protection of gay people and families. If this is the
company that Douthat is happy keeping, it says unfortunate things about
him."

While
wealthiest top one percent own nearly fifty percent of all world's
assets, the entire bottom half of the global population hold less than
one percent of the wealth, new financial analysis shows

The
top one percent of the wealthiest people on the planet own nearly fifty
percent of the world's assets while the bottom fifty percent of the
global population combined own less than one percent of the world's
wealth.

Those are the findings of an annual report by the investment firm Credit Suisse released Tuesday—the 2014 Global Wealth Report (pdf)—which shows that global economic inequality has surged since the financial collapse of 2008.

According
to the report, "global wealth has grown to a new record, rising by
$20.1 trillion between mid-2013 and mid-2014, an increase of 8.3%, to
reach $263 trillion – more than twice the $117 trillion recorded for the
year 2000."

Though the rate of this wealth creation has been
particularly fast over the last year—the fastest annual growth recorded
since the pre-crisis year of 2007—the report notes that the benefits of
this overall growth have flowed disproportionately to the already
wealthy. And the report reveals that as of mid-2014, "the bottom half of
the global population own less than 1% of total wealth. In sharp
contrast, the richest decile hold 87% of the world’s wealth, and the top
percentile alone account for 48.2% of global assets.”

Campaigners at Oxfam International, which earlier this put out their own report on global inequality
(pdf), said the Credit Suisse report, though generally serving separate
aims, confirms what they also found in terms of global inequality.

“These
figures give more evidence that inequality is extreme and growing, and
that economic recovery following the financial crisis has been skewed in
favour of the wealthiest. In poor countries, rising inequality means
the difference between children getting the chance to go to school and
sick people getting life saving medicines,” Oxfam’s head of inequality
Emma Seery, told the Guardian in response to the latest study.

In
addition to giving an overall view of trends in global wealth, the
authors of the Credit Suisse gave special attention to the issue of
inequality in this year's report, noting the increasing level of concern
surrounding the topic. "The changing distribution of wealth is now one
of the most widely discussed and controversial of topics," they write,
"Not least owing to [French economist] Thomas Piketty’s recent account
of long-term trends around inequality. We are confident that the depth
of our data will make a valuable contribution to the inequality debate."According to the report:

In
almost all countries, the mean wealth of the top decile (i.e. the
wealthiest 10% of adults) is more than ten times median wealth. For the
top percentile (i.e. the wealthiest 1% of adults), mean wealth exceeds
100 times the median wealth in many countries and can approach 1000
times the median in the most unequal nations. This has been the case
throughout most of human history, with wealth ownership often equating
with land holdings, and wealth more often acquired via inheritance or
conquest rather than talent or hard work. However, a combination of
factors caused wealth inequality to trend downwards in high income
countries during much of the 20th century, suggesting that a new era had
emerged. That downward trend now appears to have stalled, and posssibly
gone into reverse.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Inequality:
it’s all anybody can talk about ... except Democrats on the campaign
trail who, with two weeks before Election Day, desperately need to turn
out the very people so disproportionately affected by it – young and
minority voters.

But
housing and education are issues of inequality that have solutions, not
just stump-speech lines or YouTube-ready complaints. And if Democrats
have any hope left in the midterms, they cannot be this shamefully muted
on bold progressive policies that could dramatically improve the lives
of voters who just happen to hold the keys to a majority of the United
States Senate.

Barack Obama’s neglect on foreclosure has been well-documented. The housing crisis turned countless former homeowners into renters and, now, into would-be voters in dire straits. More than four in 10
of very low-income US households have no access to subsidized housing,
and are instead paying more than 50% of their income in rent, living in
horrific conditions or both. We have about as much public housing today as we did in the mid-1970s, losing 10,000 units per year, even though the US population is now 47% bigger.

An
easy fix would be to simply expand the stock of affordable housing,
especially units available to low- and moderate-income households. And
believe it or not, the Obama administration has the unilateral authority
to do so, without Congress. The National Housing Trust Fund, a program
created during the second Bush administration, was never actually
funded. But the National Low Income Housing Coalition believes we could end homelessness in America in 10 years if it was funded now. So what are Democrats so afraid of?

Money
for the fund is supposed to come from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but
their regulator – the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) – has been
preventing the cash from flowing. Now Fannie and Freddie are profitable,
and putting all of those profits towards deficit reduction, instead of setting aside a small portion for people who need somewhere to live.

Monday, October 20, 2014

Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, has too much power, and it uses that power in ways that hurt America.

O.K.,
I know that was kind of abrupt. But I wanted to get the central point
out there right away, because discussions of Amazon tend, all too often,
to get lost in side issues.

For example, critics of the company sometimes portray it as a monster
about to take over the whole economy. Such claims are over the top —
Amazon doesn’t dominate overall online sales, let alone retailing as a
whole, and probably never will. But so what? Amazon is still playing a
troubling role.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s defenders often digress into paeans to online bookselling,
which has indeed been a good thing for many Americans, or testimonials
to Amazon customer service — and in case you’re wondering, yes, I have
Amazon Prime and use it a lot. But again, so what? The desirability of
new technology, or even Amazon’s effective use of that technology, is
not the issue. After all, John D. Rockefeller and his associates were
pretty good at the oil business, too — but Standard Oil nonetheless had
too much power, and public action to curb that power was essential.

And the same is true of Amazon today.

If you haven’t been following the recent Amazon news: Back in May a dispute between Amazon and Hachette,
a major publishing house, broke out into open commercial warfare.
Amazon had been demanding a larger cut of the price of Hachette books it
sells; when Hachette balked, Amazon began disrupting the publisher’s
sales. Hachette books weren’t banned outright from Amazon’s site, but
Amazon began delaying their delivery, raising their prices, and/or
steering customers to other publishers.

You might be tempted to say that this is just business — no different from Standard Oil,
back in the days before it was broken up, refusing to ship oil via
railroads that refused to grant it special discounts. But that is, of
course, the point: The robber baron era ended when we as a nation
decided that some business tactics were out of line. And the question is
whether we want to go back on that decision.

Share your thoughts

Does
Amazon really have robber-baron-type market power? When it comes to
books, definitely. Amazon overwhelmingly dominates online book sales,
with a market share comparable to Standard Oil’s share of the refined
oil market when it was broken up in 1911. Even if you look at total book
sales, Amazon is by far the largest player.

In
terms of U.S. defense strategy, climate change is a “threat multiplier”
that can worsen national security problems such as terrorism and
infectious disease spread, according to a new Pentagon report released
Monday.

The 20-page “2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap”
said the U.S. Department of Defense is “already beginning to see” some
of the impacts of sea level rise, changing precipitation patterns,
rising global temperatures, and increased extreme weather — four key
symptoms of global warming. These symptoms have the potential to
“intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and
conflict” and will likely lead to “food and water shortages, pandemic
disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by
natural disasters in regions across the globe,” the report said.

Because
of uncertainty surrounding just how bad these problems will be in the
future, the report calls for a proactive defense strategy — one which
will require “thinking ahead and planning for a wide range of
contingencies.”

“Climate change will affect the Department of
Defense’s ability to defend the nation and poses immediate risks to U.S.
national security,” the report reads. “Weather has always affected
military operations, and as the climate changes, the way we execute
operations may be altered or constrained.”

Monday’s
report is far from the first time the U.S. Department of Defense has
warned of the risks climate change poses to national security. The
military has long shown
that it understands the realities of climate change, releasing reports
warning of altered natural disaster response and drought leading to
conflicts over food and water. The Pentagon has also released an entire report solely on its strategy to address Arctic melting, which is allowing ships to access more of the Arctic Ocean.

NEW
YORK -- Two new studies show, once again, the magnitude of the
inequality problem plaguing the United States. The first, the U.S.
Census Bureau's annual income and poverty report,
shows that, despite the economy's supposed recovery from the Great
Recession, ordinary Americans' incomes continue to stagnate. Median
household income, adjusted for inflation, remains below its level a
quarter century ago.

It used to be thought that America's greatest
strength was not its military power, but an economic system that was
the envy of the world. But why would others seek to emulate an economic
model by which a large proportion -- even a majority -- of the
population has seen their income stagnate while incomes at the top have
soared?

A second study, the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Report 2014,
corroborates these findings. Every year, the UNDP publishes a ranking
of countries by their Human Development Index HDI, which incorporates
other dimensions of well-being besides income, including health and
education.

America ranks fifth according to HDI, below Norway,
Australia, Switzerland and the Netherlands. But when its score is
adjusted for inequality, it drops 23 spots -- among the largest such
declines for any highly developed country. Indeed, the U.S. falls below
Greece and Slovakia, countries that people do not typically regard as
role models or as competitors with the U.S. at the top of the league
tables.

The UNDP report emphasizes another aspect of societal
performance: vulnerability. It points out that while many countries
succeeded in moving people out of poverty, the lives of many are still
precarious. A small event -- say, an illness in the family -- can push
them back into destitution. Downward mobility is a real threat, while
upward mobility is limited.

In the U.S., upward mobility is more
myth than reality, whereas downward mobility and vulnerability is a
widely shared experience. This is partly because of America's healthcare
system, which still leaves poor Americans in a precarious position,
despite President Barack Obama's reforms.Those at the bottom are
only a short step away from bankruptcy with all that that entails.
Illness, divorce, or the loss of a job often is enough to push them over
the brink.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist, once one of the president’s most notable critics, on why Obama is a historic success

When
it comes to Barack Obama, I've always been out of sync. Back in 2008,
when many liberals were wildly enthusiastic about his candidacy and his
press was strongly favorable, I was skeptical. I worried that he was
naive, that his talk about transcending the political divide was a
dangerous illusion given the unyielding extremism of the modern American
right. Furthermore, it seemed clear to me that, far from being the
transformational figure his supporters imagined, he was rather
conventional-minded: Even before taking office, he showed signs of
paying far too much attention to what some of us would later take to
calling Very Serious People, people who regarded cutting budget deficits
and a willingness to slash Social Security as the very essence of
political virtue.

And I wasn't wrong. Obama was indeed naive: He
faced scorched-earth Republican opposition from Day One, and it took him
years to start dealing with that opposition realistically. Furthermore,
he came perilously close to doing terrible things to the U.S. safety
net in pursuit of a budget Grand Bargain; we were saved from significant
cuts to Social Security and a rise in the Medicare age only by
Republican greed, the GOP's unwillingness to make even token
concessions.

But now the shoe is on the other foot:
Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn't
deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to
self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most
consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His
health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it's
working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of
what should have happened, but it's much more effective than you'd
think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican
obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced
countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could
be a major legacy.

I'll go through those achievements
shortly. First, however, let's take a moment to talk about the current
wave of Obama-bashing. All Obama-bashing can be divided into three
types. One, a constant of his time in office, is the onslaught from the
right, which has never stopped portraying him as an Islamic atheist
Marxist Kenyan. Nothing has changed on that front, and nothing will.

There's
a different story on the left, where you now find a significant number
of critics decrying Obama as, to quote Cornel West, someone who ''posed
as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit.'' They're outraged
that Wall Street hasn't been punished, that income inequality remains so
high, that ''neoliberal'' economic policies are still in place. All of
this seems to rest on the belief that if only Obama had put his
eloquence behind a radical economic agenda, he could somehow have gotten
that agenda past all the political barriers that have con- strained
even his much more modest efforts. It's hard to take such claims
seriously.

Finally, there's the constant belittling of
Obama from mainstream pundits and talking heads. Turn on cable news
(although I wouldn't advise it) and you'll hear endless talk about a
rudderless, stalled administration, maybe even about a failed
presidency. Such talk is often buttressed by polls showing that Obama
does, indeed, have an approval rating that is very low by historical
standards.

We
will soon see tens of millions of Americans reduced to poverty,
bringing an end to the United States as an economic superpower.

Unlike
attacks and pandemics, this crisis is an absolute certainty, one with a
clear, near start date. But the media is hardly mentioning the imminent
retirement crisis. So politicians haven’t even begun to think about it,
much less take it seriously.

Actually, “retirement crisis” is a
misnomer. The problem isn’t that people won’t be able to retire or will
be living on a shoestring, though those things are true. We’re staring
down the barrel of an epic old age crisis. For the average
American, to be elderly will mean not mere belt-tightening, but real,
grinding poverty: homelessness and hunger.

Throughout the last few
decades, vulnerable people living from payday to payday have gotten
battered by the shredding of the government safety net, a lack of
accumulated savings caused by the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism, and
a lackluster real estate market.

Now members of the poor and
lower middle class in their 50s and 60s are heading into a retirement
crisis created by a perfect superstorm.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson